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Online Prostitution and Trafficking FARLEY, FRANZBLAU & KENNEDY (DO NOT DELETE) 10/8/2014 12:01 AM ONLINE PROSTITUTION AND TRAFFICKING Melissa Farley,* Kenneth Franzblau,** and M. Alexis Kennedy*** You are not safer because you work indoors. Craigslist is just the “internet streets,” where the same predators and hustlers are meeting you with the same intentions except they look like straight people who go to medical school and have Blackberrys. I consider myself in the same risk and danger zones as a street worker. I am an upper working class anonymous client worker.1 I. INTRODUCTION The use of Internet technologies to traffic women and children to prostitution will be described in this article. We will summarize the history of online trafficking and the remarkably effective use of the Internet for advertising prostitution locally, regionally, and internationally beginning with the development of social networking sites, discussion forums, message boards and online chats. Examples of sex buyers‘, pimps‘, and traffickers‘ use of the Internet and online classified advertising sites will be provided. We will also summarize the empirical evidence for the psychological and physical harms of trafficking for prostitution and will discuss the risks of compartmentalizing arms of the sex trafficking industry that are in fact elements of multinational, constantly expanding, businesses. False distinctions have been * Melissa Farley, Ph.D., Executive Director, Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco, CA. ** Kenneth Franzblau, J.D., Anti-Trafficking Consultant, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, NY. *** M. Alexis Kennedy, Ph.D./J.D., Associate Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Emily Inouye Butler J.D. made helpful contributions to research and writing of this paper. Michal Dolce, Esq. contributed ideas for legal challenges to websites‘ invocations of immunity under the Communications Decency Act. Aashika Damodar, MPhil, provided helpful edits on crowdsourcing. 1 Marikopassion, An Outlaw‟s Insurance Policy, BOUND, NOT GAGGED (Mar. 7, 2010), http://deepthroated.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/an-outlaws-insurance-policy/. 1039 FARLEY, FRANZBLAU & KENNEDY (DO NOT DELETE) 10/8/2014 12:01 AM 1040 Albany Law Review [Vol. 77.3 erected between online and offline prostitution, child and adult prostitution, indoor and outdoor prostitution, pornography and prostitution, legal and illegal prostitution, and prostitution and trafficking. We will discuss what is known about the involvement of organized crime in online trafficking, and summarize several successful cases brought against online traffickers. We describe public campaigns and educational boycotts against online traffickers and the development of online alternatives to the sex trafficking industry. There has been a range of legal responses to the crimes of prostitution and trafficking. Prosecutorial challenges in this newly developing field include the anonymity of the Internet, blurred jurisdictional boundaries, reluctance to prosecute prostitution cases where there is no evidence of physical coercion, and a very slowly increasing number of cases brought using existing legislation, in part because of the need for special training of criminal justice personnel. Nonetheless, there are tools available that provide both criminal and civil remedies. Compartmentalization of the various arms of the sex industry, regardless of their location or legal status, has confused and sometimes derailed policymakers, the public, and law enforcement and has resulted in a failure to understand prostitution and trafficking as crimes against vulnerable women and children. Prostitution is the sale of a sex act.2 Payment for sexual use is usually made in cash but can also be made in housing, food, drugs, clothes, gas, or other basic needs.3 For young women with few alternatives, Internet prostitution is a portal into the sex trafficking industry.4 Prostitution is glamorized and mainstreamed for women who believe the recruitment messaging, ―prostitution is fun!‖ ―sexy!‖ and ―you make tons of money!‖5 Online classified websites 2 Slight variations on that definition occur by state. For example, Nevada defines prostitution as follows: ―‗Prostitution‘ means engaging in sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee, monetary consideration or other thing of value.‖ NEV. REV. STAT. ANN. § 201.295(5) (Lexis-Nexis 2014). 3 See, e.g., Stephanie Mencimer, Brave New Welfare, MOTHER JONES, Jan.–Feb. 2009, at 40, 45, available at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/01/brave-new-welfare; Nathan Hardin, Woman Charged with Prostituting for Gas, SALISBURY POST, (Jan. 15, 2012, 12:20 AM), http://www.salisburypost.com/Crime/072111-WEBcouplechargedwithprostitution-qcd. 4 See Bill McAllister, From Streetwalking to the Information Superhighway: The New Method in Prostitution, POLICE PROSTITUTION & POL. (July 30, 2011, 2:17 PM), http://goo.gl/KoussU. 5 See, e.g., Phoebe Kay, On the Wrong Side of a Craigslist Ad, SALON (Sept. 8, 2010, 9:01 PM), http://www.salon.com/life/sex_work/?story=/mwt/feature/2010/09/08/i_was_craigslist_ escort. FARLEY, FRANZBLAU & KENNEDY (DO NOT DELETE) 10/8/2014 12:01 AM 2013/2014] Online Prostitution and Trafficking 1041 Backpage, myredbook, escortpost, theeroticreview and others have sections advertising prostitution—thus functioning as online brothels. Craigslist was described as ―training wheels‖ for selling sex.6 In third world or recessionary economies, prostitution is a last-ditch survival option for poor young women or for women who are marginalized because of racism.7 Korean women, for example, are recruited by traffickers for prostitution in the United Sates via Internet advertising.8 An advertisement aimed at financially vulnerable women on the cafedaum.net website read: ―We know that in Korea these days, unemployment, the recession and the Special Law on Prostitution make it hard to earn even half of what you made before.‖9 Enticing the women into prostitution, the traffickers then specify how much money can be made in a bar or massage parlor, declaring: ―Advances possible. We take care of visas and bad credit.‖10 Most contemporary legal definitions of trafficking do not require physical movement, but rather coercion, force, fraud, or abuse of power to trap a victim in an exploitive situation. In some international legal definitions, consent is irrelevant.11 For the purposes of this article, we will use a definition of trafficking like that used in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act: ―[T]he recruitment, [enticement,] harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act.‖12 Prostitution often meets the legal definition of human trafficking in that pimping or third-party control of a prostituted person cannot be distinguished from the identical crimes perpetrated in trafficking.13 According to estimates from eighteen sources 6 Nick Lucchesi, Cops Pimp Slap Craigslist on „Erotic Services‟ Listings, RFT BLOGS, (Nov. 7, 2008, 3:18 PM), http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/stlog/2008/11/cops_pimp_slap_craigslist_ on_erotic_services_listings_prostitution_rings_internet_prostitutes.php. 7 TIMOTHY C. LIM, THE DYNAMICS OF TRAFFICKING, SMUGGLING AND PROSTITUTION: AN ANALYSIS OF KOREAN WOMEN IN THE U.S. COMMERCIAL SEX INDUSTRY 1 (2008), available at http://instructional1.calstatela.edu/tclim/articles/Final_report_Lim2.pdf. 8 Id. at 21. 9 Id. 10 Id. 11 See, e.g., Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Annex 2, art. 3(b), Nov. 15, 2000, 2237 U.N.T.S. 319 (―The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons . shall be irrelevant . .‖). 12 22 U.S.C. § 7102(9) (2012). 13 Noting the impossibility of separating prostitution from trafficking in the real world, a 2006 report by Sigma Huda, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Aspects of the Victims of Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children noted that prostitution as it is practiced ―usually does satisfy the elements of trafficking.‖ U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council, Comm. on Human Rights, Integration of the Human Rights of Women and a Gender Perspective: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Aspects of the FARLEY, FRANZBLAU & KENNEDY (DO NOT DELETE) 10/8/2014 12:01 AM 1042 Albany Law Review [Vol. 77.3 including research studies, government reports, and nongovernmental agencies, on average 84% of women in prostitution are under third-party control or pimped or trafficked.14 Fifty years ago pimps coerced women to solicit on the street Victims of Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, ¶42, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/2006/62 (Feb. 20, 2006). 14 To calculate the number 84% as an estimate of those who were under third-party control, pimped, or trafficked we used either whole number estimates or whole numbers based on the midpoint of a given estimated range. In the United States, 80–90% of those in prostitution had pimps. See JACQUELINE B. HELFGOTT, CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR: THEORIES, TYPOLOGIES, AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE 301 (2008); Jean Faugier and Mary Sargeant, Boyfriends, „Pimps‟ and Clients, in RETHINKING PROSTITUTION: PURCHASING SEX IN THE 1990S 119–34 (Graham Scambler & Annette Scambler eds., 1997). In New York City, a pimp estimated that ―70% of women working in New York City as prostitutes are being compelled to do so by pimps who use beatings and drugs, and most importantly the threat of jail, to keep their girls in line.‖ Prostitution—Legalize or Decriminalize?, DAVIS2013.COM (July 30, 2012), http://davis2013.com/prostitution-legalize-or-decriminalize/.
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